Description: As a part of the Artemis mission, building a base camp on south pole for astronauts to land, live and explore has been planned. In order to support human presence and further exploration setting up metal extraction and primary manufacturing facility is essential. The extraction plants that are developed for earth on the moon is cost prohibitive and complicated since necessary consumable are not readily available on the moon. Hence special processes are being developed. The products from these processes expected to be with varying level of purity, smaller in quantities, and non-uniform in size. In such scenario the metal products also expected to have regolith entrapment on the surface. To convert such metal products into structural members in the form of angles, rods, or tubes requires an energy efficient, reliable, and contaminant tolerant process that is capable of consolidating and forming into required shapes. Enabled Engineering proposes to use a novel, 2023 Big IDEA Challenge award winning, modular and multifunctional SolidStir® manufacturing technology to produce structural truss elements such as tubes, angles and rods in solid-state. SolidStir is a Friction Stir Welding/Processing (FSW/P) based continuous plastic deformation process. This energy efficient technology can also be adapted for upcycling, additive manufacturing and joining. This process can be operated as independent system or augmented with other system with rotary axis. The objective of the program is to demonstrate the feasibility of manufacturing truss members such as tubes, square rods and angles from simulated metals from lunar metal extraction process using SolidStir® extrusion technology. The deliverables include a report on know-how of process, material-structure-process-property relationship with varying contamination levels, effect of process parameters on force and energy requirement, and specification and design of SolidStir® extrusion system for lunar environment.

Benefits: The consolidation, stirring, extrusion, and deposition aspect of a compact and modular version of SolidStir® technologies can be used for several NASA applications in-space, on lunar surface and on earth. Following are the brief description of some of the applications. Upcycling: Since the SolidStir® technology is feedstock form agnostic, it can be used to convert metallic wastes materials into useful products. Metallic space junks, end-of-life structures from launch vehicles, and satellites can be converted into structural elements that support the Artemis mission. Additive manufacturing and Repairing: The solid-state deposition aspect of the technology can be used to build or repair space and lunar structures. The feature addition aspect can be used strengthen existing structures by adding stiffening ribs. This aspect can also reduce the material wastage when manufacturing light weight structures with increased stiffness by using thinner plate material rather than using thicker plate and machining them away. Lunar pipelines and electrical lines: Solidstir® extrusion technology is a continuous process which can be used to extruded seamless tube and pipes without any length limitation. This aspect of the process can be used for building pipelines for water, hydrogen and oxygen on the lunar surface. This technology can also be useful for manufacturing wires to transport electrical energy from solar panels to application areas on the lunar surface. There are several civilian applications market sectors have been identified for this technology. They are summarized below. Primary manufacturing: The SolidStir® extrusion technology energy efficient compared to the conventional extrusion technology. This technology could be used to convert the primary ingot into final extrusion shapes in fewer steps with wrought microstructure. Adaptation of this technology could save large energy and carbon emission while significantly reducing the capital cost. Manufacturing of microstructurally sensitive materials: There are several novel alloys developed using solid-state processes such as ball milling. Such alloys suffer from lack of scalable fabrication processes. SolidStir® technologies can be solution in such scenarios. Additive manufacturing: Solid-phase additive manufacturing is one of the fast growing additive manufacturing technology. However, the current solid-phase technologies suffer from low deposition efficiency and feature resolution. SolidStir®-AM can solve these issues by depositing a narrower track that does not required major machining of the deposited material. Recycling: More than 65% of the powder metal produced using atomization process for powder bed based additive manufacturing are rejected due to particle size restrictions. These metal powders can be converted into feedstock for wire based additive manufacturing of deposited directly as components. Similarly, the wrought metals purchased for aerospace structures are heavily machined and thrown away as scrap metal. These material can be converted into valuable products using SolidStir® technology. Sustainability: Several end of life components and system can be refurbished using SolidStir® repairing. Some of the examples include bridges, ship hulls and military infrastructure. Supply chain for legacy products can also be restored using this technology. Alloy development and Composite manufacturing is another identified application area.